Last week was exhausting, but good. I hung out with the editors of Only Poems at their AWP booth. Met lots of poets, some I even exchanged information with. Bought too many books, many of them signed. Jen, a friend from Missouri State and River Pretty, was there and we got to hang out.
And holy shit, I picked up two journals with my name in them.
Poetry journals with my name in them
I know this feeling of seeing your name in print might eventually go away, but I was giddy as fuck.
Los Angeles is a weird place to do AWP. All the offsite readings were somewhere else and required your own car or ride share. I ended up staying in Santa Monica with a friend, so taking the 10 every morning to the convention center was pleasurable enough to remind me that living there would make me want to scratch my eyes out. I couldn't imagine what my Lyft/Uber/Waymo bill might have been.
It's a gigantic conference, so I can see why the cities AWP chooses to have the conference in are usually not walkable. Still doesn't make it fun.
I can't imagine trying to attend this thing if I wasn't fully-abled. I had the luxury of parking my car at the convention center and when I filled my bag up with books, the ability to schlep them down to my car and dump them, and doing that over and over again.
The room for the book fair was gigantic. The distance from entering the convention center to the book fair was long. I never used to think about accessibility before my herniated disc, when I couldn't walk for four months, but an experience like that changes how you see things, especially when the writing community is comprised of many people who need accessibility considerations. AWP did some things to help with accessibility, but not enough.
It's the same in software. We think anything we do for accessibility is a gift. We've satisfied the VPAT or whatever. It's not enough. We do so little.
